Students win award for cattle management app

A new award-winning app designed by Scottish students to track and manage livestock information has been launched on app stores.

The Cattle Manager App was created by students from Wick High School in Caithness in order to help farmers manage the health records of their livestock.

"The problem is keeping track of all the paperwork for the cattle," one of the students told the BBC. "By law you have to keep track of the cattle because if you don't you get a heavy fine. You need to keep track of what sort of animals are going into the food chain and how healthy they are."

The app aims to replace the need for paperwork and could ultimately save time for farmers when accessing cattle's records, including vaccinations, the number of calves a cow has had, its age and its import and export details.

"We hope that in future we can put paperwork out of it totally and just have the information on an app, whenever you need it, and save running about the place," the student added.

"The app also gives you reminders of what injections are due. It saves you having to look at the paper. It just comes up as a notification on the top of your phone. It just beeps at you and tells you you've got to give something an injection that day."

In the future it could be possible to use a similar system for other livestock, such as sheep. The developers are currently in discussions with the British Cattle Movement Service (BCMS) to allow the app to connect directly to a central database.